User Interface Part 4 – Key Bindings

Clique

Clique is my go-to mod for all of my healing spells. It is a very simple mod to set up. Open your spellbook and you will see an extra tab for Clique.

Clicking this will open up the Clique interface, where you can bind all your spells. Just find the spell you want in your spellbook and press your desired key+click binding. Voila! It’s bound. Clique bindings use your mouse-buttons (the more you have, more more bindings are possible), with Shift, Ctrl and Alt as modifiers. Here are all my Clique bindings on my druid:

I do all my healing using Clique in combination with Grid. With this setup, you never have to target the person you want to cast a heal on, you just need to mouseover their box on grid, and do the appropriate click for the spell you want to cast. This makes healing, especially raid healing, very efficient. If you are not used to clicking or mouse-over macros this might feel awkward at first, but soon enough it will become second nature.

Bindpad

BindPad is a mod I just started experimenting with recently. Since the use of Clique is so ingrained in my playstyle, using keyboard bindings feels a little awkward.

Setting up BindPad is simple. Type /bp to open up the menu. There are separate pages for each of your specs. Just drag the spell you want to bind into one of the empty slots from your spellbook or your macro list. Click on the spell and you’ll be asked to press the key you want to bind it to.

Right now, my druid mainly uses Bindpad for for my life-saving abilities like health stones, barksin and health pots. However, since keybinds are new to me, I still sometimes have to think before using them. Because of this, I still have these abilities on my action bars just in case. I hope to make more extensive use of Bindpad on my hunter so I can clear some more abilities off my bars.

Dominos and Bartender have a similar interface for this. Simply enter keybindng mode (for your specific toon or you can bind keys for ALL your toons – DO NOT RECOMMEND). Then you hover over the key you want and PRESTO. I can see Bindpad being useful if you run out of Dominos space, like if you're a druid and have to use all your bars on paging for forms.

After looking at the Dominos keybinding function, there really isn't any difference. With Bindpad, the abilities don't need to be on a bar in order to be bound, but as you said, you can hide bars with Dominos anyway, so it doesn't really matter. I guess that's one mod I can get rid of.

The real purpose of Bindpad is as a extended macro panel. YOu only get 36 general and 18 character specific macros in the default interface; Bindpad provides approximately a jillion more. Blizz macros can be put on an action bar, but not keybound. Bindpand macros can be keybound but not put on an action bar.

Fair warning about Bindpad: sometimes, it just stops listening to bound keys. I can't narrow down what causes it, but once it decides to ignore a macro, you'll never get it back short of copying that ability or macro to another Bindpad slot. This odd, unpredictable and untraceable behaviour caused me to stop using it recently.